Opera: Passion, Power and Politics 歌劇：激情、權力和政治

The Victoria and Albert Museum, in collaboration with the Royal Opera House, creates a vivid and immersive journey through nearly 400 years of opera, exploring its passion, power and politics.

Opera: Passion, Power and Politics is the only exhibition ever to explore opera on a grand scale, it immerses visitors in some key moments of the history of European opera from its roots in Renaissance Italy to its present-day form, by focusing on seven operatic premieres in seven cities. It reveals how opera brings together multiple art forms to create a multi-sensory work of art, and show how social, political, artistic and economic factors interact with great moments in the history of opera to tell a story of Europe over hundreds of years.

More than 300 extraordinary objects are shown alongside digital footage of compelling opera performances. Objects on display include Salvador Dali’s costume design for Peter Brook’s 1949 production of Salome; Music in the Tuileries Gardensby Edouard Manet, a masterpiece of modernist painting contextualising Wagner’s modern approach to music in 1860s Paris; the original score of Verdi’s Nabucco from the Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milan; and one of two surviving scores from the first public opera L’incoronazione di Poppea. Original material from the 1934 St Petersburg premiere of Shostakovich’s avant-garde Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is reunited and displayed outside Russia for the first time.